Today the Mozilla Foundation announced the new 0.8 version of Firefox (formerly Firebird), their next generation Web browser. If you haven’t looked at it, it’s time. Firefox is a free open source program for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. It allows you to:

• Automatically block pop-ups! (You can allow some/all through if you want.)
• Search with the box integrated right into the upper corner. (Pick the search engine(s) you want. My choices: Google, Yahoo, IMDb, Dictionary.com and Amazon.com.)
• Browse with tabs. Sound unnecessary? Try this: install it, then click a link with your mouse’s scroll wheel. The new page quietly opens in a background tab, allowing you to finish reading the first while your next page loads. Slick.
• Use Flash, Quicktime, Java and (most of) the rest… just like that other browser.

The campaign calls for “taking back” the web because major operating system vendors, such as Microsoft and even Apple (whose own excellent Safari browser is based on the open-source Konqueror) are no longer treating the browser as separate programs available for all, but instead as just another component of the operating system. Inevitably, this could lead back to Web pages that only work for the latest (expensive) versions of those systems.

Firefox offers a better choice. It’s small, fast, multi-platform, and it’s being updated far more frequently than the ancient IE. I’ve used Firefox as my primary browser for almost as long as it’s been available, and I never want to go back to pop-up/ActiveX/security hole hell.

So try it out. You’ll like it. And if you don’t, well, hell: it’s free anyway. (Note the servers are really busy today, so you might want to download from here.)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2004 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Geekery.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.